The 3rd International Conference on Modern Management based on Big Data (MMBD2022)

Abstract: Although the literature on corruption at the country level is rich, it is geared towards the determinants of corruption in contrast to its consequences, and fewer studies have focused on the impact of corruption at firm level because of data limitations. This paper addresses this gap and contributes to the literature on the consequences of corruption at firm level. It investigates the impact of country-level corruption and firms’ anti-bribery policies on analyst coverage. It uses a negative binomial count regression method on a longitudinal data set of a sample of S&P Global 1200 companies for the years 2010-2015. After controlling for potential endogeneity bias, the results show that the adoption of anti-bribery policies at firm level attracts more analysts to follow a firm. The results for corruption at country level show that analyst coverage increases in less corrupted countries indicating that the costs of corruption exceed its potential benefits. When the variables corruption at country level and anti-bribery policies are interacted, the relationship is positive and highly significant. Given the potential important role played by anti-corruption measures, firms are encouraged to adopt them to reduce the incidence of corruption and to increase analyst coverage, which will reinforce the benign effect of monitoring.

Keywords: Corruption; Sell-side analysts; Analyst coverage; Analyst following; Anti-bribery policies; multi-country

Biography: Dr. Omaima Hassan is a senior lecturer in accounting and finance and the Research Degrees Coordinator (RDC) at Aberdeen Business School (ABS) of the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. She teaches corporate finance to UG students and portfolio investment to PG students. She supervises students at all levels including research students (MRes; PhD). She is also the RDC of the ABS where she takes care of the research students from pre-recruitment stage to their graduation stage. Before joining the ABS, she was a lecturer in financial accounting in the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University, London, where she taught financial accounting to level one students and company valuation for PG students in Finance and Accounting. Her research interests are in corporate reporting and market-based accounting research, in particular, the determinants and economic consequences of corporate disclosure; the impact of corporate governance on the level and quality of corporate disclosure; accounting quality and financial reporting quality; measurement of corporate disclosure; the information content of accounting information; corporate credit rating, audit fees and audit quality.